Part One. How do you feel about all this fuss that’s being made over you? The child performer Brooke Shields was nothing less than a pop culture phenomenon. From her big-screen debut as a child prostitute in Louis Malle’s controversial art-house drama Pretty Baby to her nudity in Blue Lagoon, her supposed romance with Michael Jackson and the Calvin Klein ads directed by Richard Avedon (You wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing, ran one tag line), she was everything, everywhere, all at once. It just felt so arbitrary and unmerited. Startlingly beautiful, her career as a sexualised young girl was run by momager Teri, an alcoholic who was divorced from Frank Shields, the Revlon executive son of a tennis star descended from the Holy Roman Emperor (which the actress learned in the most outrageous and extraordinary genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are?. That was an appropriate revelation for someone who was essentially American royalty. Watch it!) Watching her on TV and film it’s hard to separate the beauty from who she actually is. But the reality was of course somewhat more tawdry than the superficial fame and glamour as it tends to be in the history of child stars. Shields dissects on camera her own experience of fame in this impressively constructed documentary, a mosaic of incidents, career high points and relationships. She was famous at a time when, unlike today, fame really meant something. She was on hundreds of magazine covers. Everyone knew who she was. The day I brought her home from the hospital I just always knew she was going to be a star, declared Teri. And so at eleven months old when Brooke was the Ivory Soap baby, a star was born. Classmate and fellow actor Laura Linney recalls Brooke’s departure to California and seeing commercials on TV and ads in the newspapers. She worried for her young friend from the third grade: She was a young girl in an all-adult world. The sexualising of little girls was a response to the second wave of feminism, one commentator suggests as we are presented with a montage of photographs of a very young Brooke in lingerie. There was no plan, Brooke says now. They lived from job to job. All I ever wanted to be was an actress. It all blew up with art-house film Pretty Baby, which gives this two-part documentary its title. Brooke was eleven years old. Her first kiss was on film. I knew it was going to be in good taste and it wasn’t any porno movie, she told an interviewer. Was writer Polly Platt critiquing the New Hollywood in this tale of a virgin child sold at auction? Malle’s ambiguous approach isn’t short of its exploitative aspects. Her raucous mother was a drunk so a movie set was the safest place Brooke Shields could be. Blue Lagoon was a monster hit and one that the kids could see. They wanted to sell my actual sexual awakening, Brooke says now. She was on every TV show going. Little Drew Barrymore recalled seeing her at Studio 54. People had a belief that Brooke belonged to them, says Gavin de Becker her security guard, a man she came to see as her brother. Her public image went on trial when she sued a male photographer who was a family friend for selling nude photos taken of her when she was nine. She lost the case. The entirety of my life, over and over and over again, ‘She’s a sex symbol.’ It sears me. Sexuality was another subject in the film Endless Love. I didn’t trust the director to create a safe environment for me, she says of Franco Zefirelli. She dissociated from the experience. She became a vapour. She shut down. She was a workhorse. Everything was transactional. Then she had to handle her mother’s drinking problem with an unwanted intervention which had limited success. The separation came when Brooke went to Princeton. A sex symbol doesn’t go to Princeton. People gave her space – too much so. She wasn’t crowded any more. She was lonely and went home each weekend and called Teri five times a day but it was Teri who persuaded her to stick it out when she wanted to give up. She gained confidence in her own opinions and took part in stage musicals as part of the college’s Triangle Club. On TV, she was mocked.
Part Two. I was struggling to find my own voice. Hollywood was run by white men. She was typecast. A publisher approached about writing a book. They didn’t want her text. They replaced it with inanities about leg warmers. For me sex and love go together. When she spoke out about not wanting to feel pressured into having sex she was asked about her virginity and again found herself the topic of choice for late night comics as well as unwillingly becoming a public representative for young womanhood, ‘a virgin vassal’. She can’t live in the space in between because people don’t know what to do with that. This new persona was a relief for the public, says Jeffrey Alexander, cultural sociologist, because it meant that the earlier transgressions weren’t really true. Speculation about her dating life filled columns. It was very childlike, she says now of her friendship with Michael Jackson. Her first sexual relationship was with fellow student Dean Cain (later to find fame as TV’s Superman). He had to reassure her that she was still the same person after taking her virginity. I thought I was going to graduate and go right back into a movie a year. The one movie she made in that four years of college out was Sahara and it flopped the year she graduated. She did commercials. She was asked by interviewers if her career had peaked. She was twenty-two years old. It was a really scary rough period of rejection. To go that high that fast and then just – nothing. It was so difficult on so many levels. Then she heard about a movie role and she was in consideration. She went to a meeting. She ate dinner. She drank. She needed a cab. The man told her he’d call her one from his hotel room. She was raped. I just thought, Stay alive and get out… God knows I knew how to be dissociated from my body. I had practised that. She got her own cab to her friend’s house and told Gavin de Becker what had happened and he said it was rape. I’m not willing to believe that, was her response. I wanted her to know she hadn’t done anything wrong. She does now. I think she does, he says. I believed somehow I put out a message and that was how the message was received. When she did a film in Africa (Running Wild) mutual friends introduced her to tennis star Andre Agassi – by fax. They exchanged long letters and found they had a lot in common. I loved that I didn’t have to be the biggest thing in the room. He urged her to start up again. Her mother was descending into total alcoholic oblivion, found across state lines, suffering mini-strokes. I was trying to take control systematically of everything but she just wasn’t hearing it. Brooke shipped the contents of their office to Las Vegas. She had moved from one controlling relationship to another. Something in me knew that I wouldn’t be able to separate from my mother without somebody like Andre. With a new agent she gained a second career on stage, doing musical comedies. She played Joey’s psycho girlfriend on an episode of TV sitcom behemoth Friends. Agassi was on set and became enraged at her performance despite having approved the script beforehand, going home and smashing up his trophies. They divorced a few years later. We weren’t meant to be husband and wife. Then she was offered her own show, Suddenly Susan. It was tagged, Brooke Shields as you’ve never seen her before. It was a terrific TV sitcom. She in a way created a counterplot. She was pretty and funny. It was an energising and cathartic experience and for the first time she felt she was doing what she was meant to be doing – but the writing was limiting her characterisation. She got noticed, it got cancelled. I think I did set out to say, You all think I can’t do this, but just watch me. Then she met Chris Henchy, the writer and producer whom she ultimately married and to whom she remains married to this day. He just wasn’t fazed. Not by her mother, nor by her father, who had recently received a cancer diagnosis. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to be a mother. Getting pregnant was not easy and required several rounds of IVF treatment following a miscarriage. Her daughter Rowan’s birth was traumatic. The aftermath was also traumatic. I gave Chris the baby and then I just left. I went to bed. She got outside help for post-partum depression. Her agent persuaded her to tell her story. Down Came the Rain yielded an interview with Oprah Winfrey. I think it gave people permission to feel these things and get help. Then Tom Cruise (her Endless Love co-star) denounced her on The Today Show for taking anti-depressants. She responded with an Op-Ed in The New York Times. As friend Judd Nelson says, she was being accused of being a bad mom (she knew all about having one of those) but, he declares, She’s not just a big girl – she’s six feet tall – she’s got a big brain. Brooke told Cruise he should stick to fighting aliens. Cruise apologised a year later. In the meantime, Brooke played her role in the Mothers Act legislation introducing protection for women with similar problems. She was better prepared for the arrival of her second daughter, Greer. When I was born my mother was so afraid I would die she slept with me strapped to her chest. When Teri developed dementia Brooke put her in a suitable facility. When Teri died there was no closure. I sort of had said goodbye a long time ago. Brooke could finally be herself. Nowadays in New York City 2022 she’s filmed with her family and she ruminates about Rowan wanting to model and her daughter says of Brooke’s show Lipstick Jungle, It was like old people in Gossip Girl. The girls never want to watch Pretty Baby. Everything is different now. Why are they posting on TikTok and Instagram and how is it different, she wonders. You’re creating your own self-confidence, she concludes as they tell her they’re over sixteen and are empowering themselves. She is in awe of them. Having daughters changed me. The notorious child famous for her precocious sexual image is now a fully formed, articulate and apparently very happy adult. It’s the first time in about fifty-six years that I’m owning my identity fully. Brooke Shields – what a woman. What a survivor. Directed by Lana Wilson. She was always beautiful
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